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RALEIGH — The auto inspection sticker is vanishing. Is the auto inspection next?

Researchers told a legislative committee Tuesday that the state should scrap its annual safety inspections for automobiles.

“Safety inspection programs are not effective in reducing accidents,” Yana Samberg, a researcher with the General Assembly’s program evaluation division, told legislators Tuesday.

The inspection program was started in 1965 in response to a rapid rise in highway accidents. When a car is inspected, a technician looks at tires, wiper blades, headlights and other safety equipment.

But there’s no good data, Samberg said, that shows whether failures with that sort of equipment have contributed to any large number of accidents.

“If it’s not effective, we should eliminate it,” said Rep. Hugh Holliman, a Davidson County Democrat and House majority leader. Holliman said the inspection program had outlived its usefulness.

By eliminating the annual $13.60 inspection, the state could save motorists $3.1 million annually.

In Tuesday’s committee meeting, no one spoke against the idea.

But Tom Crosby, a spokesman for AAA Carolinas, said the annual inspections were a good idea. Some people will let routine maintenance such as replacing headlights and rotating tires slide if they’re not prompted to fix problems.

“When you do have to bring it in, you do get your car back into shape, if only for that one day,” he said. “We ought to keep it.”

The committee ordered staff members to draft legislation that would eliminate the safety inspection and make other changes for review in the General Assembly session that begins in January.

Another change the committee looked at Tuesday involves emission inspections, which are conducted in cars based in 48 counties throughout the state, including Guilford.

The inspections are to make sure that cars built in 1996 or after comply with clean air laws by checking whether emission control systems are working.

In her report, Samberg recommended that cars three years old and younger be exempted from the emissions inspection requirement. Fewer than 2 percent of those newer cars fail inspections, she said.

Crosby said that AAA would support that change, saying the current system makes little sense.

“They’re inspecting vehicles that don’t need inspections and not inspecting those that do,” he said. It would make more sense to look at cars older than 1996 more closely rather than exempting them, he said.

Those cars are exempted because they don’t have the on-board computers that can tell inspectors if an emissions component is malfunctioning. North Carolina no longer does a test that can be administered without such a computer.

Holliman, too, supported this idea.

“If we’re inspecting something where we’re only finding a 2 percent failure rate, we’re in an overkill mode,” Holliman said.

But environmental regulators said that changing the emission requirements could hurt efforts to reduce emissions in the state. In particular, they said North Carolina could run afoul of federal rules designed to cut down on the amount of ozone in the air.

“It’s very important we keep the emissions program in place as it is,” said Keith Overcash, who leads the Division of Air Quality.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com